Influences acknowledged

• Other Poetry Workshop members – but not overly so. Their close reading of my work has shaped it to some extent, but we have not begun to sound like one another.
  
  
• Writers I read, but also or especially: Ashbery, Gwendolyn Brooks, Frost, Hacker, Moore, Anne Sexton, Whitman; Drayton, Hopkins, Hughes, Morgan; Rilke.
  
  
• Shakespeare, the King James Version of the Bible and hymns of the Methodist/Baptist tradition.

Influences shaken off or sat upon

Rod McKuen, John Ashbery, T.S. Eliot. McKuen was a popular (cult) figure in my youth, a poet-songwriter, and too many of my early poems were inconsiously striving for his voice. Ashbery and Eliot are both influences to keep under control. I could write reams of cod-Ashbery, without even thinking about it – as many contempory American poets now do! – and strongly resist the impulse to do so. The Eliot of Prufrock, the Quartets and Wasteland is deeply embedded in my poetic background, where I try to keep it from escaping when I write.